Xavier carefully unwrapped his present. It was a book about Jewish rites and customs throughout the ages. He smiled.
“I thought you’d like it,” Bettina said. “But you can exchange it if you want.”
“No, no,” Xavier said, “I don’t have this one yet. Thanks. But how did you know I was interested in this?”
“Everyone knows that,” she said. “I’m interested in things like that too. I love peoples who have a real culture of their own. And I think men with a culture of their own are a lot more interesting too.”
“More interesting than who?” Xavier asked.
There was no reply. She was the way all women that age should be, the way all women of all ages should be, in fact. And so she cried. First quietly, then louder and louder. Then Xavier began crying, too. At first because he figured you were supposed to do that when someone left you. But he was touched by Bettina as well, how she sat there on the bed, cross-legged, the stuffed animals — four in total — lined up against the neatly painted wall. A beloved’s pain was easier to bear than her joy. Only when she was obviously in pain did you get that pleasant feeling: She needs me. I’m not here for nothing.
Xavier looked at the book about Jewish rites and customs. A book with illustrations, not like Mein Kampf. Written in yellow letters on the cover was “Richly Illustrated.” This book contained everything about the culture of the people he was going to comfort, a threatened culture.
He thought of Mr. Schwartz.
Bettina went out and came back with a roll of paper towels.
“Here,” she said.
They daubed at their faces, and Bettina put an arm around Xavier.
He looked at the stuffed animals: a dog, a bear, a lamb, and a mouse. Then he leafed through the book and looked at the typically Jewish faces. He wondered what it meant, that everyone at his school knew about his interest in this subject. Probably not much good. Jews were no longer in fashion.
“Xavier,” Bettina said, without taking her arm away, “maybe we just don’t fit together.” Art tries to convey emotion, he recalled. This was how he had explained it to Awromele. You-Know-Who had wanted to be an artist. You-Know-Who had tried to convey emotion, even though the father of You-Know-Who forbade him to do so. Perhaps that was why You-Know-Who had started his thousand-year Reich. It must be horrible to make something, to work on something for years, and then to find out that it doesn’t convey emotion.
“Xavier,” Bettina said again.
She wasn’t Jewish, but he still found her awfully sad.
Xavier closed his book and folded the wrapping paper around it. “Maybe ten years from now neither of us will have found anyone else,” Bettina said. “Then we can start over again.”
As Xavier was getting up to say goodbye, he was struck by how powerless he was to convey the poignancy he’d felt just a few minutes before. But the more he thought about how he could ever do that, the less certain he was that the feeling of poignancy had ever been there at all.
They hugged. Bettina said, “Maybe even a week from now, we’ll think, How could we have been so stupid?”
“Yes,” Xavier said, “we might think that.”
Strange, actually, that only now, now that he was losing her — or being freed of her, he wasn’t sure which — was he starting to love her. Maybe not a lot, maybe in all the wrong ways, but still. When you cried over someone, and with someone, there was a fair chance that you loved that someone.
“I’m going to bring you a present, too,” Xavier said. He held the book about Jewish rites and customs to his chest, kissed Bettina on the lips, and left the room where he had been deflowered, where he had wept for the first time in the presence of another, and where he had adopted two Indian villages.
He never went back there again.
WHEN HE ARRIVED HOME, Xavier found his mother standing in the living room with her raincoat on. She looked bad. Xavier’s first thought was: She’s found out that I’m going to get circumcised.
But the mother said: “We’ve been waiting for you. We have to go to the hospital; there’s something wrong with your father.”
Marc came out of the bedroom. He was pulling on a blue V-necked sweater, They climbed into Marc’s car, a twenty-year-old Alfa Romeo. Marc liked flight simulators and industrial design.
On the way to the hospital, no one said a word.
The architect was lying in a room of his own. Intensive care. A nurse was doing something with him, but when she saw the visitors she said, “The doctor is coming,” and left.
The three of them stood around the architect’s bed. He wouldn’t open his eyes.
“Maybe you should wait outside for a bit,” the mother told Marc. “If you don’t mind.”
“You’re right,” Marc said. “That would be better.” Marc’s parents were both still alive; they had constitutions of iron. He didn’t see them very often — once every three months at most. He wasn’t used to sickness and death. To him, death was nothing but a pig you could use to make excellent ham.
When he was gone, Xavier’s mother said to her ex-husband, “Hello, sweetheart, it’s us.”
The architect still didn’t open his eyes.
The neighbor lady had found him earlier that afternoon, lying beneath his punching bag. He must have been lying there a while. She had a copy of his house key, for vacations and emergencies. Because the architect’s car was blocking her driveway, and because he didn’t pickup the phone, she had decided this was an emergency and barged into his house in a fury. She hated it when other people blocked her driveway. Then she had found the architect lying helpless beneath his punching bag, and her rage disappeared. “Poor man,” she had murmured, “poor, poor man.” She called the emergency number. And forty-five minutes later, with a certain eagerness, she had let the ambulance crewin to her neighbor’s house. “So young,” she told the attendants, “and there you are, lying in your own house like that. No one to care for you. I put a pillow under his head and threw a blanket over him.”
The attendants had lifted the architect into the ambulance without a word. For a moment the neighbor lady wondered whether she shouldn’t go along to the hospital. But she had a hat-making course to attend that afternoon.
“Xavier, say something to your father,” said the mother, who was feeling at a loss.
“Hi, Dad,” Xavier said. “It’s me, Xavier. How are you doing?” He realized that the situation was critical. The equipment that had been arranged around the architect’s bed spoke of the dedication with which the medical profession tried to prolong dwindling lives. Yet all he could think was: If this is death, it’s awfully boring. He wasn’t familiar with death, only from the secret notes his grandfather had left behind, death as a club, death as a simple man with simple beliefs who occasionally strikes out when all he needs to do is guard. Death was so normal, so simple, so ordinary.
Xavier’s next thought was less edifying. If his father died, the only one left for him to convert to Judaism was his mother. Maybe he could convert Marc as well, but he had a hard time imaging Marc as a Jew. Besides, he wasn’t interested enough in Marc to bother showing him the way to the chosen people.
“He looks so pale,” the mother said, “and so sunken. We have to talk to him. Hello, sweetheart. Hello, dearest.” She caressed her ex-husband’s forehead, but he didn’t respond.
The mother had her feelings under control. You-Know-Who had not had his feelings under control. He had listened attentively to those feelings, and had heard the strangest things.
Finally, the doctor came in. He shook hands with mother and son and led them to his office, where he tried to explain the situation. He didn’t want to give them any false hope: “I want you to realize that the chances are very slim indeed, and…”